


The Library Job

by epeeblade



Category: Leverage
Genre: Case Fic, Humor, Multi, Post Series, libraries are awesome, lots of cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21833890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epeeblade/pseuds/epeeblade
Summary: Hardison finds a soft-ball mission for the crew. Time to steal a library.
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 13
Kudos: 91
Collections: 2019 Leverage Secret Santa Exchange





	1. The Job

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seraphina_snape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphina_snape/gifts).



Hardison pressed the clicker to progress to the first slide, an image of their client, Kim Clark. He’d chosen a flattering picture, or so he thought, of the young woman who’d contacted him via his secret message board. She wore a smart-looking blazer and had her natural hair pulled back into a loose bun. 

“This is our new client.” He cleared his throat. This shouldn’t be hard, but the last few missions - they’d been rough ones, working through the black box and stopping some shady shit. The bruises had just started to fade from Elliot’s face, and Hardison damn well knew Parker had some emotional bruises that might never fade. Since he loved them both, Hardison would do his best to protect them from any further breakage - at least for the moment.

It’s why he’d picked this one up. A nice softball mission to get them back in the game and helping people one on one. “She’s a graduate student. Her advisor has been stealing her research, and he plans on presenting it at the largest academic conference around.” Hardison clicked to the next slide. “Professor Allen Smith. Never promoted past Assistant Professor. His career kind of took a dive a few years back. Hasn’t published anything new or exciting since his own dissertation.”

“What field is this?” Elliot spoke up, still staring at Hardison with that frowny forehead thing that made Hardison think thoughts he shouldn’t, well, not in the middle of a briefing anyway. That forehead thing was fair game in the bedroom. “Are we talking about a Rosalind Franklin situation here?”

Hardison lost his place in his speech. “You know Rosalind Franklin?”

“Who doesn’t?” Parker piped up.

“DNA has a very distinctive structure,” Elliot said. “And she deserved the credit for that.”

Hardison loved his geeky lovers, even if they didn’t realize they were geeky. “Well, yes, and no. Yes, the dude is trying to take credit for her work. No, in that the field is English Literature.”

Eliot blinked in such a way that Hardison heard it. “How the hell can you steal research in literature?”

“Kim has been doing some archival research. She’s been going to public libraries, searching their papers, and finding connections to an author - in this case Walt Whitman.” Hardison got back on track, moving to the next slide showing the front of the Princeton Public Library. “She says she’s gotten lucky, but the girl needs to admit her skill. Nobody else has managed to find all these letters that old Walt sent out into the world and ended up in the basements of libraries.”

“And that professor is going to present all this work as his own?” Parker cracked her knuckles. “Let me at him.”

“That’s my job.” Eliot smiled.

“If all goes well, there will be no hitting involved.” Hardison put a stop to that right away. The last thing he needed was for a fight to break out in a library. “We are planting a fake letter at Princeton Public. Dude knows she was planning on heading there next and is going to try to beat her to the punch. When he tries to present that fake letter at the conference, that’s when part B will take place.” Hardison flipped to the next slide, which brought a rare smile to Parker’s face. Oh yeah, he still had it.

“Well then,” she said, “Let’s go steal a library.”


	2. The Mission

Infiltrating the library was a lot easier than he had thought. Hardison went in, identified himself as being sent by IT to work on their computers. Instead of being questioned, the young woman at the circulation desk wearing a Harry Potter t-shirt said, “Oh, thank god. Can you fix the printer too?”

Hardison blinked. “I can try. I’m going to need a place where I can work undisturbed for a bit.”

She let him into the circulation manager’s office. Hardison sat in front of the computer, cracked the incredibly weak password in seconds, and then frowned hard at the Windows XP operating system. “Seriously? This shit hasn’t been supported in years.”

“Tell me about it,” Circulation girl shrugged. “Well, good luck!”

She went back to the line of people waiting to check out books.

Hardison pulled out his laptop and set it up on the desk. He used the network access to hack into the library’s security cameras - which only focused on the outside. Damn. 

He’d gone to the library a lot, as a kid. It was one of the things his Nana did with all her fosters. He could check out whatever he liked, as long as it was a book and he read it. Hardison had gotten his first coding book that way. He still had a fondness for the librarian who slid it across the desk to him, when he’d been too shy to even ask. 

But his past experience mean he understood how libraries worked, how they valued their patron’s privacy. That meant no cameras near the Reference Desk, the Circulation desk, or any of the books or computers. People should be able to research with their privacy intact. Rare to find that nowadays. 

“Hey, so that printer is spitting out black pages again,” the circulation girl came back. “Do you think you could take a look at it?”

Hardison looked at his watch. He had some time before Parker and Eliot got into place. He should be able to fix it.

Minutes later…

“Son of a, what the, who the hell thought that was a good idea.” Hardison found himself working up a sweat as he battled with a printer straight out of the stone age. Printer would print just fine, as long as it wasn’t hooked up to the library’s pay for printing machine.

“I’ve always hated that system,” circulation girl - her name was Andrea - said. “I wish we didn’t have to charge for printing, but the library can’t afford the ink and paper without it.”

“Huh.” Hardison wiped the sweat off his brow and narrowed his eyes. “Could you give me a few minutes?”

It took him less than fifteen minutes to rig up a system where the printer seemed to think it was charging patrons for print outs, but the money was really coming out of the pockets of the CEO of the local chemical company. Dude should pay for something, and supporting the public library would do it. While he was at it he upgraded the library’s internet access, all at the expense of Mr. Billionaire.

Hardison wiped printer ink from his hands, and unhooked his laptop from the attached computer. When he turned to go back to the manager’s office where he’d set up, he ran into the tallest white dude he’d ever seen. “Whoah.”

The guy blinked down at him. He had shaggy hair, puppy dog eyes, and shoulders too wide to fit through a standard doorway. “Don’t I know you?”

Crap. Hardison ran through his mental rolodex, but nothing came up. “Sorry, man. I’m just the IT guy.”

He did a little dance to get around the stranger, but Hardison was aware of his eyes following him back to Circulation.

*** 

Eliot sat at one of the computers in the public area, across from the Reference Desk and with a direct view of the front entrance, which consisted of tall glass doors and an all glass wall from floor to ceiling. He supposed it looked pretty, but the glass would make it hard to defend the library from threats outside.

Not that he expected any. Eliot was here as backup only, in case someone tried to stop Professor Smith from taking the bait in the archives. Still that didn’t mean he didn’t take his part of the job seriously. He took careful note of every individual in the library, looking for possible threats.

The librarian sat at the reference desk with his head down, giving Eliot only a glimpse of his short dark hair. He could see the name badge, but could only make out the last name “Stone” from his vantage point. There were two men - one looked to be in his 90s, the other much younger - arguing over the newspaper at a table in the corner. A frazzled looking teenager typed frantically on one of the computers, on what looked to be a homework assignment. There were far more people gathered in the children’s area off to his right, which made sense. He’d seen the signs for storytime on his way in.

He opened up an internet browser and pretended to be engrossed in surfing the web. 

“Parker is entering the building,” Hardison’s voice came over the coms. 

Eliot held himself ready. If someone looked to intercept her, he needed to get in their path.

She strode into the library in her sensible heels and pencil skirt. The two men arguing about the paper stopped for a second to glance in her direction, but both went back to their argument a moment after she passed.

He made sure she made it to the back, through the door that would lead her to the archives. Good. 

Now he needed to make sure Smith made it to the library.

“Eliot, we got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“The kind of problem where we have a gang of skinheads approaching the library.” Hardison’s voice sounded increasingly panicked.

Eliot looked through the giant glass window and could see them approaching down the street, armed with baseball bats and chains. “What the hell are they doing at a library?”

He could hear the sounds of a keyboard in the background, and then Hardison cursing under his breath. “They’re here to protest drag queen storytime. I missed the Facebook post about it.”

Rage filled Eliot at the thought. These jerks brought violence to a place of knowledge and inclusion. Not on his watch.

He glanced over to the elderly security guard standing near the door and knew the man was not equipped to deal with the assholes on their way in. Eliot got to his feet, met the blue eyes of the librarian who’d also stood and both of them made for the doors. Eliot picked up a hefty wooden chair on his way over.

*** 

Parker had called Sophie while she prepped for the library job. “What does a librarian wear, exactly?”

She could make out Sophie hesitating on the other end of the line. What she couldn’t work out was why. Parker had called her dozens of times for wardrobe advice. Sophie had a knack for picking the perfect outfit for every job. Plus it was just nice to hear her voice every now and then. Since Sophie and Nate had gone off on their extended honeymoon traveling around the world, Parker didn’t get to speak with her nearly as much as she liked.

“Do you mean the sexy kind of librarian or the regular kind?”

Parker blinked. “The regular kind.”

“Oh, thank God, I thought you were calling about…” Sophie trailed off. “Well, let’s just say I didn’t want to give you any advice in regards to the bedroom.”

“Gross,” Parker said. “I call Tara for that anyway.”

She didn’t hear Sophie’s response to that. In fact, it sounded like she’d dropped her phone. Finally Sophie came back on. “Tell me about the job.”

Parker explained.

“Right, then you want to look professional, but not too out of place. Skirt, bun, sensible heels. No higher than two inches. I may have left you something in your closet that would fit the part. Third hanger from the left.”

Before Sophie and Nate had taken off, Sophie had bequeathed Parker with her “closet” of costumes for grifting. Parker had taken advantage of it more than once. “Got it.”

“Have fun with it. Let me know how it goes.”

Parker was grateful for the sensible heels as she made her way through the library down to the secret archives. The stairway was narrow, poorly lit, and the no-slip finish on the steps had started to peel off. She pushed open the final door to reveal a quiet area with long tables and decrepit looking chairs. There was a man stationed at the desk marked with faded gold letters that said “archives.”

She put on her best smile and came around the back of the desk. “Hi,” she said. “They told me you’d be able to show me around?”

He blinked up at her behind coke bottle glasses. “What? Who are you?”

“The intern? It’s my first day.” Her lower lip quivered, and she put everything she had into looking nervous and upset. “Didn’t my advisor call you? They were supposed to have called you!” 

A few minutes of back and forth had him flustered and reassuring her that they’d get this squared away soon. She gave him the fake card Hardison had made up for her, and then the archivist led her on a tour of the archives. It was only a matter of time before she could slip into the file and put in the fake letter.

Now all they needed was for their mark to show up.

*** 

Eliot rubbed his knuckles and glared at the skinhead stumbling to his feet. The guy held up one hand and backed away. Most of the little gang had already turned tail and run, unable to deal with the combined skill of Eliot and the librarian.

“And stay away,” the librarian muttered, also rubbing his knuckles. He nodded at Eliot and held out his hand. “Jacob Stone.”

Eliot shook his hand, admiring the grip. He found himself giving his real name, impressed with the fighting skills of this man who looked so much like Eliot, he could be his brother.

“Nice work. Have you ever considered being a librarian?” Stone asked.

Eliot blinked. “I didn’t know being able to knock skulls was a requirement.”

“You’d be surprised.” 

They both re-entered the library, Stone stopping to talk with the security guard, while Eliot returned to his computer. “Front entrance is clear,” he told Hardison.

“Good thing too, because our mark just pulled into the parking garage. Parker, are you ready to go?”

“Yup. Just waiting on the distraction.”

“Coming in three, two, one…”

*** 

“What do you mean? I didn’t order an extra archival supplies. They are demanding what?” The archivist all but shouted into the phone.

Parker hid her smile as she filled the photocopier with paper and pretended she wasn’t listening.

He came over to her, wiping sweat off his forehead. “I’m sorry, my dear. I have to head upstairs, it’s something of an emergency. While I’m up there I’ll get this whole internship mess squared away as well. While I’m gone if you could just tell anyone that comes that I will return shortly?”

“Of course.”

She waited a bit to make sure he wasn’t going to suddenly turn around and come back. Then Parker started rearranging some things. By the time Smith came down, she’d look like the library’s archivist. Lastly, she set up the tiny camera that would give Hardison a perfect view of the entire area.

“Ready for the turkey,” she said as she moved into position behind the desk..

“I thought we decided no nicknames for the marks,” Hardison grumbled. 

“I never agreed to that.”

“Stop flirting over coms,” Eliot broke in. “Save it for later.”

Parker didn’t get a chance to reply. The door to the stairwell opened, revealing their mark. He wore an ill-fitting suit with leather patches on the elbows, and carried a brown briefcase. Smith frowned, and that looked like his normal state of being.

Parker pretended to be so engrossed in her work that she didn’t notice him. That made it look like she actually worked there and wasn’t just sitting around waiting for him, even though she was.

She’d learned a lot over the past few years.

Including assessing someone’s psyche pretty quickly. Hacking their souls, she’d called it. It still made her uneasy, but to be fair, it helped a lot with the jobs.

“Excuse me!” Smith said. “I’m looking to check out a specific set of papers. Your online catalog said you have them available.”

She looked up and sighed. “What papers?”

He slid over a printout that had been folded many times and was creased all over. Parker took it and squinted at it. “Do you have a library card?”

“I was told I could use my faculty ID for collateral.” He put a laminated blue id card on the desk.

“It’s going to take me a few moments to find this.” She took his ID. “Please have a seat and I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She moved back into the archives shelving, where she’d pulled the requested box of papers, already seeded with the incriminating letter. “He looks like a jerk,” she whispered. “Do you think he’ll take the bait?”

That was always the risk. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, it happened. Someone didn’t take the shiny that Parker dangled in front of them. She had to be prepared in case they didn’t. In this case, they were looking to get him to either steal the letter himself, or not say anything after finding it in his briefcase after Parker slipped it inside. From Hardison’s research, he looked like the kind of arrogant SOB who’d do one of the two. After all, he was already stealing his own student’s research for his own purposes.

It turned out that Parker didn’t even have to slip him the letter. She watched as he found it, and his eyes lit up. 

“Excuse me,” he came up to her immediately afterward, “I was wondering if you had the second box of letters I could look at? I believe the catalog said there were two?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll check.” She turned to go back to the stacks. While she was gone, the camera captured him taking the letter and slipping it into a manila envelope that he slid into his briefcase. 

By the time Parker came back with the requested box, he had already packed up. “Sorry, I realize I need to run. Thank you for your help, bye!” He scurried away, his face flushed and he nearly dropped the briefcase before stumbling towards the stairway.

New criminals were so obvious.


	3. The Mission - Part b

Hardison stood with his back pressed against the wall in the packed auditorium, flanked on either side by Parker and Eliot. Normally for this kind of thing he watched from afar, behind the safety of his computer screens. But this time he kind of wanted to see Smith’s downfall in person.

It seemed like everyone at the conference had shown up. Smith had been advertising his unique find all throughout the building - there were posters and it was even in the program. Dude was about to get his ass handed to him.

Hardison checked his watch. “Showtime.”

Smith stepped up to the podium set up on the little stage in the front of the room. Behind him was a giant screen with the first slide of his powerpoint visible. “Thank you all for coming,” he started, and then winced, as did everyone in the room, at the microphone feedback.

“Someone needs a better tech guy,” Hardison mumbled.

They didn’t have to wait long for the big reveal. Smith wasn’t the kind of guy who understood subtly or showmanship. He was just eager for the accolades he thought due him for stealing his student’s work. Jerk had it coming to him.

“For the first time, we have direct evidence that Walt Whitman corresponded with Oscar Wilde. And I found the proof.”

“I’m going to ask again, why does this matter?” Parker had pulled out her phone with the video app running. That was his girl, she knew shit was about to hit the fan.

“That’s the problem with academia sometimes,” Eliot said in that growly voice that just did things. Not only to Hardison but probably anyone in a mile radius. “Vicious politics. Low stakes.”

“Some Walt/Oscar shippers would love to have some canon,” Hardison said, and was shocked, downright shocked at the blank looks he received in response. “I’m linking both of you to AO3 tonight. Literary RPS section.”

“Shh,” someone said in the row in front of them.

Smith was unveiling his masterpiece, the scan of the letter he’d stolen from the library.

As if on cue - and actually, it was on cue - the front doors to the auditorium were thrown open and men in black suits entered the room. The leader strode through the crowd and up the steps to the stage. Smith had stepped away from the mic, but not far enough. Everyone could still hear him.

“What the hell is going on here?”

The man in the suit pulled out his wallet and showed his badge, “Peter Burke, FBI”

“FBI?” Smith swallowed, “This is a misunderstanding. They told me I could borrow the letter.”

Parker snorted. “I so did not.”

Burke seemed unfazed, and either he realized his voice was being broadcast throughout the room and was playing it up for the audience, or he didn’t care. Two other agents came up on the stage and started fitting Smith with handcuffs.

“So you admit to possession of this forged letter?” Burke gestured to the powerpoint. “Ladies and gentlemen, please be advised this is nothing but a forgery by famed con artist Neal Caffrey. Please take anything you heard today by this man with a grain of salt.”

Smith sputtered as they lead him away. As planned, their client jumped up on stage and calmed the crowd. She proceeded to give the presentation her way, with her own research to back it up.

The FBI took Smith, his computer, and all of his paperwork out of the room.

“How the hell did you get Neal Caffrey to do it?” Eliot turned to Parker.

She grinned. “He owed me a favor.”

Now that was a story Hardison was looking forward to hearing. He followed Parker and Eliot out of the auditorium, in the opposite direction of the FBI. “So, what exactly did you do with that librarian outfit?”

Parker tsked. “I promised Sophie I wouldn’t use the librarian outfit for any nefarious sexy time purposes.”

“You did what?” Hardison’s jaw dropped. If anything killed his libido, it was thinking about Sophie knowing about his sex life. “What is she asking about…”

“It’s okay,” Eliot interjected, a gleam in his eye. “I’ll be the librarian.”

Now that.That could work. Hardison grinned.

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, thank you to the mods for organizing this challenge.
> 
> Second, thanks to my recipient for helping me to flex my creative fannish muscles again!
> 
> Third, thanks to Lapillus for the beta!
> 
> There are a bunch of cameos in this. In the library, the tall guy Hardison meets is Sam Winchester from Supernatural, who would recognize Hardison because his actor played a character who killed Sam at the end of season 2 (he got better). Jacob Stone is Christian Kane's character from the TV show The Librarians, which really is what inspired this whole fic. The old guy arguing over the newspaper is supposed to be Post Endgame Captain America. And lastly, the FBI agent at the end is Peter Burke from the TV Show White Collar (as is Neal Caffrey). I've headcanoned Parker and Neal having crossed paths many times.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
